A READER ON THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS PRIMARILY BETWEEN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN WEST, BUT ALSO THE HINDU, THE CONFUCIAN, THE BUDDHIST AND A MYRIAD OF OTHER FAITHS AND DENOMINATIONS WHO SUFFER AT MUSLIM HANDS.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Muslim journalist: "The truth is, we do have a problem in our Muslim community"

From Jihad Watch:

Muslim journalist: "The truth is, we do have a problem in our Muslim community"
Here is yet another Man-Bites-Dog story about an actual bona fide anti-terror Muslim. If the mainstream media narrative about Islam being a Religion of Peace that has been Hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists were correct, there would be ten thousand Asra Nomanis.

I am glad she is saying these things, and her support for justice is most welcome. However, I am not going to fall into the trap that an increasing number of anti-jihadists are falling into: thinking that if they don't have "anti-Islamist Muslims" fronting their efforts, those efforts are somehow delegitimized. In my piece "Why Can't Non-Muslims Criticize Islam?," I explained why it really doesn't matter whether or not one or two Muslims can be found who say the right things. It is good for them to say them, but to pretend that they're more numerous or representative than they really are among Muslims misleads uninformed Americans into thinking that the problem is not as large as it actually is. Also, it plays into Sharia prohibitions on non-Muslims criticizing Islam, and validates the Leftist/Islamic supremacist "racism" canard by working from the assumption that a non-Muslim speaking out against jihad is less legitimate than a Muslim doing so, and may have evil motives that the Muslim could not have.

"Muslim journalist defends surveillance by NYPD, says some Muslims 'use religion as cover,'" by Catherine Herridge for FoxNews.com, March 13 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The New York Police Department has faced criticism for its surveillance of the Muslim community, but one prominent Muslim journalist defended the department in an interview with Fox News.
“We use religion as a cover,” said Asra Nomani, a 46-year-old journalist whose work has been published by the Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast. Nomani, a native of India, says radical ideology is very real -- and damaging to all Muslims.

“We're saying that you can't go into our mosques, you can't look at our Muslim organizations, you can't even look at Muslims because that's to target us," she told Fox News during an interview in suburban Washington. "But the truth is, we do have a problem in our Muslim community.”

Nomani showed Fox News a Koran from a mosque in West Virginia. She says the Koran’s Saudi publisher added negative language about Jews and Christians. This interpretation of Islam, Nomani says, is part of a larger problem.

“I think that there is a movement in America right now to claim this concept of Islamophobia, to say that people are hating on Islam," she said. "Let's be honest, there are people that do hate on Islam. But I think that (Police Commissioner) Ray Kelly and the New York Police Department have been targeted in this larger campaign to try to show that people are picking on Muslims.”

Nomani is right about Kelly, but as for her statement "Let's be honest, there are people that do hate on Islam," come on: no one would care about, much less "hate on," Islam, were it not for jihad terror and Islamic supremacism. For some reason no one in America is spending any time "hating on" Hinduism or Buddhism -- a fact that gives the lie to the Islamic supremacist/Leftist claim that opposition to jihad is motivated by "racism" and "bigotry."

The New York Police Department's controversial surveillance program involved efforts to infiltrate mosques and Muslim communities on college campuses to gather intelligence on potential threat. News of the secret program has sparked strong reactions, both negative and positive.
Nomani said the Muslim community should take charge: “I think we would be better served by being more proactive rather than defensive.”

Nomani worked with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and his throat slit by Islamic radicals in Pakistan in February 2002. Pearl’s death was a personal turning point for Nomani in her thinking on religion.

“They did their prayer on the blood-soaked floor of the room where he was murdered. And so, that was when I knew that we needed to challenge how it is that people of supposed faith use religion to sanction their violence," she said.

Nomani , who is codirector of the Pearl Project, which investigated the facts surrounding his death, said the search for the killers was eye-opening.

“In our five weeks searching for Danny, what I discovered was that the Pakistani police had no place that was off-limits to them. There was no political correctness in their books about mosques that they couldn't enter," she said.

As for the Attorney General Eric Holder's confirmation last week to lawmakers that his department is reviewing complaints about the NYPD’s surveillance, Nomani was unequivocal: If you draw the line, make it clear that the terrorists are on one side and everyone else is on the other.

“I think that Ray Kelly has a sophisticated understanding of what the problem is, that it's a reality," she said. "And I would tell him to just keep going for it, you know, and really help us clean up our mosques and our communities."

Nomani also has faced a personal cost for her activism, which was profiled in a PBS documentary called “The Mosque in Morgantown.”

“I’ve had death threats," she told Fox News. "I’m not going to be voted most popular at the local mosque. But I think that those are the calculations you have to make when you want to make a difference.”

Why isn't Asra Nomani the "most popular at the local mosque"? Aren't those who support jihad terror and Islamic supremacism only a Tiny Minority of Extremists?

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